Sevdalina's Comments

Sevdalina:

From the page: "potato boiled for eight minutes can make for a battery that produces ten times the power of a raw one. Using small units comprised of a quarter-slice of potato sandwiched between a copper cathode and a zinc anode that窶s connected by a wire, agricultural science professor Haim Rabinowitch and his team wanted to prove that a system that can be used to provide rooms with LED-powered lighting for as long as 40 days. At around one-tenth the cost of a typical AA battery, a potato could supply power for cell phone and other personal electronics in poor, underdeveloped and remote regions without access to a power grid."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists, think? From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, âoeThe least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.â Jungâs wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds. "

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Europeans are not buying as many cars as they once did. They are buying bikes, though. A lot of bikes. In 2011, they bought 20 million bikes 窶" nearly twice as many bikes as they bought cars."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Across the world, most human beings simply wait for things to become an emergency before thinking about solutions. Such is the default mode of human existence almost everywhere. It takes a rare, highly intelligent i"

Sevdalina:

From the page: "this reduction by a single city represents more than one-quarter of 1 percent of the emissions cut that would be necessary worldwide, on a sustained basis, to prevent the planet from heating up by more than about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. That is the amount of heating generally considered to lead to major societal impacts."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to taylor their properties by chemical means."

Sevdalina:

Amendments of Bulgariaâs Forest Act, adopted on 13 June 2012 by the Bulgarian Parliament, will lead to the plundering of the countryâs last significant natural resource - its forests, including those forming Natura 2000 areas. Concerned citizens and the coalition of environmental NGOs âoeFor the Natureâ are calling on Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev to veto the unscrupulous changes and safeguard Bulgariaâs forests. The environmentalists are also sending a signal to the European Commission for unauthorized governmental aid to oligarchic corporate organisations, which the amendments represent.

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Laura Hewitson and her colleagues at UP conducted the type of proper safety research on typical childhood vaccination schedules that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should have conducted -- but never has -- for such regimens. And what this brave team discovered was groundbreaking, as it completely deconstructs the mainstream myth that vaccines are safe and pose no risk of autism."

Sevdalina:

Sevdalina:

From the page: "In four years, the electric-car company Better Place has traveled from startup to starting line. Last week, a fleet of 100 electrically powered Renault Fluence ZE sedans set out in a caravan along Israeli highways, signaling the start of the company's efforts to reach a wide swath of consumers."

Sevdalina:

From the page: Even ignoring the numerous environmental risks, nuclear power doesn't make sense on a pure dollars-and-cents analysis. Nuclear power simply isn't economical when you factor the impact of indirect expenses and fees, and thus can't compete in an open, unsubsidized market for electricity.

Sevdalina:

From the page: "he cost of electricity from onshore wind turbines will drop 12% in the next five years thanks to a mix of lower-cost equipment and gains in output efficiency, according to new research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The best wind farms in the world already produce power as economically as coal, gas and nuclear generators; the average wind farm will be fully competitive by 2016. "

Sevdalina:

From the page: "By the measures of success that should matter, it is far from clear that the investments made by the DOE in Solyndra and in hundreds of other technology projects over the past three years have failed. Notwithstanding the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of solar cells continue to rise, their costs continue to fall, and new technologies keep entering the marketplace to fight for a piece of a market that barely existed three years ago. The same is true in advanced batteries."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Chronic pollution makes Bulgaria one of the world窶s deadliest places to live because of poor air quality, despite years of efforts to improve monitoring and comply with EU standards. But Bulgaria's problems are not isolated and reflect broader concerns over air quality among EU member states."

Sevdalina:

Sevdalina:

From the page: "The German-owned utility, which owns the npower supply business, has started an internal probe of its plans to construct two possible atomic power stations at Wylfa in Wales and Oldbury in Gloucestershire."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "Hybrid cars normally combine conventional engines with battery-powered electric motors. But many carmakers are developing alternative types of hybrids窶"some of which were on display this month at the Frankfurt Motor Show in Germany."

Sevdalina:

From the page: "This is bad news for nuclear advocates: Nuclear power turns out even more expensive than we thought. According to a study by Arthur D. Little, the four German nuclear utilities (E.ON, RWE, EnBW, Vattenfall) face costs of at least $25 billion for decommissioning their reactors."